Still Soft With Sleep - Part 1, Chapter 6
by Vincenzo Barney
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Vincenzo Barney is a Vanity Fair contributor. He wrote Still Soft With Sleep for his senior thesis at Bennington in 2018. He is working on a book about Cormac McCarthy and Augusta Britt, a story he broke for Vanity Fair last year.
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The night had an odd brightness to it and the garden was bathed white when the moon came out. The flowers glowed like moonroses and the tide of the night washed over the rose. There was a complicity between the moon and the color of the petal that suggested concessions larger than I could measure. There seemed parts of the garden brighter now than in day, and the light took the underhang of what the sun had laid in shadow. The night was no reprieve from the heaven that had opened overhead and the brightness of the moon laid on every living thing as if to say, “I am still touching you. I am still wrapped around you and shall tug you away at any moment.”
The moonlight answered to the winter that was in my mood, as if walking to the boathouse I walked warmly through a snowbank. Though no one in the boathouse knew Chris was Rosie’s killer a mania edged into the gathered energy that can only come from getting drunk on the rim of someone’s newly opened psychic wound. A wound whose lips had opened and was seeking to be pushed through to the kill. He knew it in his heart even if he’d closed his soul against it that some part of him was slipping out, and this leakage put a warp in the room everyone took a curve through.
Elvis had disappeared up to the fifth floor and I didn’t ask him to come with me. The tide was high in the full moon and the shoreline landed high almost to the sea grass. It was a glass brim, the brim a mirror, and the moon in the mirror, Jamie laying drunk with his arms stretched around it like a snow angel. The sea was nearly flush with the dock and we left Jamie there with Serena and the Gavins, and Chris boated the rest of us over to his father’s yacht anchored at the mouth of the harbor.
I had been watching him all night and it was on his father’s yacht against the rail that I saw the edge of his spirit slip from him. I saw it tug out and stand next to him in a state of limbo. I could see the stress of the day in him – the stress perhaps not yet of policemen but of his father and his lawyers and his conscience – and I could see a sleepless night before him. No matter how much he drank tonight he would not be sleeping. Somewhere in the day he had smelled the breath of the beast on the back of his neck and turned to face himself in the mirror of his soul and saw his own death. A voice had whispered to him, even if briefly, even if from a cavern whose depth he’d never plumbed, that the cleanest route to justice was to be killed by Rosie’s father. The knowledge was like water finding its lowest point and though the physics of the psyche answers to higher constants there was no skirting this truth. The brain is ancient, and if pain is as old as the body then somewhere there had woken inside him the knowledge that he had called for his own blood.
For a moment I saw him in a state of heightened quality, as a condemned man briefly glows as they approach their executioner and there is a brief urge no matter how evil to stave the man from death. Here was a man who had come to see that his own face, the face he’d watched change over twenty-seven years so slowly that its aging was imperceptible, that it was like a flowing stream the difference between his face as a child and now, that buried in the contours of this face, in the squint and angle of the eyes, was the destiny of a face that is to be killed. That this stream however slow and pure in its origin deserved to be destroyed. That if his mother, the source of Chris’s appearance on this Earth, could be in possession of his fate at the moment of birth – if some oracle could have revealed it to her in her wildest pregnant dream – she would have to look at her child’s face and know that in twenty-seven years he will be killed, and his death will be deserved and it will be good. And that was it: he had the look of a man who has come to know that his imminent death would be just.
He would slide, and his sense of justice struck against the calm assurance of his father, but in gathering the strength to be a coward for the rest of his life was the knowledge that what was written in his fate was deliverance unto murder, and in rejecting destiny he would live forever in imbalance.
He teetered toward me now with a beers in his hands, one for me, and I recognized that bringing half the party to his father’s yacht was a way of better cornering me in private. None of the Gavins were aboard and without thinking about it I had not yet gone into the yacht but had isolated myself on the deck for him, inviting him to talk to me when the groups drew apart and everyone lost focus on each other. He put his finger to his lips and brought me down a gangplank away from the deck in the starboard of the ship where the moon was shining most strongly.
“I assume you’ve heard,” he whispered.
Something about him finally glowed, became rounded.
“Yeah,” I said. “I heard.”
He tried to edge some calm command of the situation into his voice but it wouldn’t hold together when he spoke.
“Where’s Elvis?”
“At Mayflower.”
“Has he heard?”
“Yeah.” I paused to read his face, seeing what he needed. He was nervous and of course this conversation was the first of making sure we would all stick together on the plan. “We’re sorry this happened to you,” I said, and he broke and took this condolence ravenously into him, for what he needed now was to be consoled as victim and feel we were with him. For a few seconds he broke into the posture of the child within him, and I was embarrassed for him, the way he shivered into himself and put his hands on the rail and bent his head.
“Yeah, thank you, thank you,” he said rapidly. “It’s fucking nuts.” He let this settle. I could see him straining toward another will, breathing strangely as if he’d just discovered dangerous depths inside where his breath could now touch. Straining in his torture for some divinity or pattern through which to ascend out of his fear but he was too afraid to look, or he didn’t know where. The moon did not even exist for him and he looked down at the bright slow waves and I watched his eyes search and probe. I saw him regret how little he’d ever thought of these things and I enjoyed the Milky Way smeared above him, that lost white of the sky. I could even feel the yacht’s slow bob in the water.
Failing to have proper vision he closed up. His failure was being punished by fear and I saw his calculus collapse into a safety net of lawyers and money and local connections and the confidence in his wealth and then there it was, swallowed up, all the fear and guilt. Now it became an arrogance, a new facet of his bad masculinity. How far apart were fate and justice I could not say, but the glow that had been there went out of his face as he pulled out of the moonlight and I saw again he’d already been born outside of whatever the balance was. He was born where man had gathered enough gold to tilt the balance in his favor.
“But this shit happens, you know? More than we think.” He looked at me. “Our fathers all had crazy shit like this happen when they were young, and the test of a man is to live it down and get through it, you know?”
I had been drinking and taking so many drugs to set an edge against myself, to give myself a wall to come up against, but I kept overwashing all possibility of boundary and I could not undercut myself. I was held in culpable innocence. Alienated from failure. But I knew when to quit a party and I made my way to the tender where Chris’s boat was tied. I laid on the floor of Chris’s boat looking up at the moon and it kept splitting into two moons. I was blinking to bring it back together when Chris and Caleb rocked my cradle with their footsteps. I lay looking up at Caleb and he said not a word and it might have been that he hadn’t seen me at all.
They didn’t say a word and Chris pushed the boat forward slowly. It was very late and I thought maybe they didn’t want to draw attention to their departure.
Driving through the dark and the lamplit moorings and invisible winking buoys was like tunneling through the lightbeds of space and the oceandark fabric rippling into brief crests of light, the wind humming into the rippled edges, curling them and spraying them into wet broken beads. There was a rim to what could be seen of the waves, and the whitecaps were blue in the blackness beyond this horizon. But close to the boat the spray was so white that it was as if we were shattering the liquid light of the moon itself. They were so drunk and I was so soundless that I don’t think they knew I was on the boat until we slowed by Robinson’s Hole off Naushon Island and I stood up and put my arms around the teetop.
“This is too close,” said Caleb. “People beach it here every day.”
“What is this is?” asked Chris.
“Naushon.”
“Yeah,” said Chris. “You’re right.”
“It’s a bad idea.”
Chris cut the wheel and spun us from Naushon Point toward the dark bulge of Pasque island. The whole thing was a bad idea and it was a good thing Chris was given to bad ideas because they might bring him to failure, or at the least up to the edge of his wealth. Chris was smart enough not to use his GPS and scanned the dark rim of the Elizabeth Islands with his drunken eyes. Drunkeness did not vivify him, and all his eyes showed now was the curdled fear of a child. I didn’t want him to see the inlet off Pasque but he did and he put in and I sat on the edge of the boat with my arm on the teetop, my shirt filled with warm wind. I could not even grow a belly with so much beer, and it felt flat and comforting slipping under my waistband.
I looked down and saw it, wrapped in a towel on Chris’s lap.
“Careful Chris,” said Caleb.
Not wanting to go too deep he beached in the mouth and hopped the side of the boat with Caleb. Caleb looked hesitant about going onto the sand, and I forbade myself putting my footsteps in it and they did not ask it of me. They left the engine running and hadn’t bothered to throw an anchor up the shore, a lapse which gave me a moment’s fantasy about reversing and driving off.
But I stayed, and I sat looking up at the sky. There were fast whisps of cloud moving across the moon, brightening seams pulling apart. Around the moon in the clouds a rim of light, rainbow wool.
I saw the tips of their dark shapes pause in the black treeline and soon they were back.
Heading back there were deep flames laid in the ultraviolet coastline, a black just visible beyond black, and a glitter as of distant deep red starlight, which Chris and Caleb did not see.
On our starboard and passing it by I pointed at it, “What’s that?”
“What?”
“That.”
Chris swung his spotlight out with no clue where to place it, lighting foam and froth in the small telescoped narrowness of the light.
“No,” I said, “there.”
And they saw the crimson hull and the rocking flames against the blackness. The spotlight overlit the burning reflection in the water as we approached, erased the clarity of the fire in the sea and I drew the spotlight away and the flames bobbed in the waves like lit water. We drew toward Naushon a nimbus from the burning boat. It was a wooden Hinckley. The light of its cradled flame haloed it in the water, a perfect circle if the waves held still. But they did not. They put a chop into the vividness and we lay outside its rim. Only man could have put a fire on the sea, this was something we had added to nature and the fire took over its flame and burned with an intensity to the levitate the flame, and put a fire on the moon.
“Hey!” I yelled in the boat. “Hey!”
For a moment we pulled close enough for me to put a leg onto the boat and with my arm holding our teetop leer upwards in the chop and try to see down the companionway. I let go of the teetop and stepped into the Hinckley. The flames were burning straight through the hatch high enough to melt the wax of the furled sails. There were small explosions inside and I could hear beyond the fire Caleb and Chris calling to me. I walked forward a step to look down the companionway into the cabin but everything was being burned into the same shape and the same light and I called but there was no answering. I choked on the smoke and crouched and tried to look through the liquid curl of shape, some layer to it as of memory, an amber in it like the iris of the lost white of Her eyes but the black smoke caught in my eyes and I could not see and turned back to Chris’s boat which was circling and now drew close enough for me to leap to it.
“Look at the shore, maybe the shore,” I said coming back onto the boat.
And there like knifing shadows as we sped away with the spotlight on Naushon, like ghosts that had never belonged to a single soul, three or four bodies threw their arms up in the air at us from a stretch of private beach.
“Call the coast guard,” I said, and by the time Chris landed I had bound over the rail and landed up to my waist in the water carelessly between rocks. I was too fast to slip on them. There was a small family on the beach, wet and breathless. They were down on the beach watching their boat burn and making their way toward Tarpaulin Cove where there’d be many overnight boats moored to get radio help for their mother. I followed them in the confusion up a hillock to an abandoned barn where their mother was. The boat had caught fire past midnight and they had swum to Naushon and had no radio to call for help or flairs to shoot. Her burns were magmal in the darkness of the barn. Her eyes too white and I was afraid to touch her and we decided the only thing now was to wait for the coast guard. I held her hand on and off while she repeated restfully that she was alright and I looked into the new purple of her wounds in a darkness that I hoped hid the angle of eyes from her. But as my eyes adjusted to the dark the color of her’s became hazel and she must have felt my eyes hurtling into her wound for when we looked at each other she closed her eyes in pain.
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